Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage for the day, but we will return to keep chronicling the second Trump administration on Thursday. Thanks for reading, and here are some of the day’s developments:
Chuck Schumer, leader of the Senate’s Democratic minority, said that Democrats will not provide the necessary votes to adopt a partisan funding bill passed by House Republicans, which includes cuts to vital services and programs. To avoid a shutdown on Friday, Schumer said, the Senate should pass a temporary measure and then negotiate a longer-term measure that can garner bipartisan support.
Rather than take Schumer up on his offer to negotiate, Republicans quickly rolled out a social-media strategy to blame him for shutting down the government by not accepting the Republican effort to ram through the partisan funding bill.
US district judge Tanya Chutkan granted a request by 14 state attorneys general for discovery in a suit against Elon Musk and his so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge) service to uncover the “parameters of Doge’s and Musk’s authority”, and the identities of Doge personnel.
The federal judge Beryl Howell has blocked an executive order that Donald Trump signed last week directing agencies to terminate contracts and no longer interact with Perkins Coie, a law firm that worked with Democrats during the 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns.
The Trump administration quietly cleared all remaining migrants from the American military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba this week.
The secretary of state, Marco Rubio, defended the detention of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the United States who took part in student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza, by claiming, without evidence, that the Columbia graduate student was “a big supporter of Hamas”.
It was another day of trade turmoil, with the United States imposing tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum and Canada and the European Union retaliating with levies of their own. Canada’s reaction has been particularly forceful.
As his administration moves to gut the Department of Education, Donald Trump levied an attack on employees at federal agency, accusing them of being lazy.
The Wisconsin supreme court candidate Susan Crawford drew attention to Elon Musk’s massive spending in favor of her opponent, the state’s former Republican attorney general Brad Schimel, in a televised debate on Wednesday by mashing the names of the two men together.
After Schimel suggested that nearly half of Crawford’s donors came from outside the state, she turned to him and said: “I have support from all over the country, and it is because Elon Schimel is trying to buy this race, and people are very upset that and they are disturbed about that.”
“He is spending over $10m,” Crawford continued. That dwarfs the contribution of anybody else, in any campaign in Wisconsin history. People should be very concerned about that”.
Updated
